Before and After in Denver: A Home Office Turned Vintage Style Bathroom

BEFORE: This bathroom was originally a balcony in what was probably a very grand turn of the century Denver home. It was updated in the early 1990’s to an office with an open loft area to the downstairs. Pretty, isn’t it? 🙂

My clients live in a gorgeous old home on a tree-lined street in Denver’s beautiful and historic Park Hill neighborhood. It’s the kind of neighborhood in which you could picture raising smart, well-read children while engaging in witty banter with the eccentric, yet friendly, activist neighbors.

This particular home was built in the early 1900’s and there was only one upstairs bathroom for the entire family. The client challenged Golden area contractor West Elevations and myself to create a second family bathroom in a small office that had originally been a back balcony for the home.

BEFORE: Here’s Evan, of West Elevations, eyeballing the stone threshold that is original to the home. You can also see how it’s open to the room downstairs.

The client and I had so much fun designing this little space. We both wanted to play up the vintage style of the home, but not be beholden to it. Also, adding a new second floor bathroom is not an inexpensive thing to do, so we did need to be budget friendly with the finishes. We found a beautiful cast iron, extra long claw foot tub by Barclay at Rampart Plumbing’s Showroom and knew right away that we wanted to paint it a fun color.

The client has this sweet art tile from Motawi Tile and wanted to use it in the room. We matched the yellow on the chickadees to the tub and took the pale blue background and used that as the wall color.

I love this yellow – it’s a soft daffodil that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Here she is sitting pretty! This was not an easy piece for the guys to get up the stairs. The feet were shiny chrome that looked a little too flashy, so we had them painted black to tie it into the floor.

I decided to run the tile up to the top of the door frame to help with water splash (this is a room used by 3 kids). I added a black pencil liner under the ceramic chair rail to tie it in with the black tile baseboard. You can see the chickadee art tile to the right of the tub in the photo below. The tile installer did a beautiful job making it level with the rest of the tile. The wall tile is by DalTile and the flooring is from Merola Tile – all purchased at Denver’s Floor Club.

AFTER: We put in an extra long claw foot tub, added a toilet room where the closet was and managed to fit in a custom double vanity (Photo by Sara Yoder for Laura Medicus Interiors)

I shared the making of this Craiglist-find furniture piece into a double vanity in another blog post – you can read more about that here. It was important to the client to put something unique in the space here.

Here’s the Craigslist buffet on the front porch before the talented carpenter got his hands on it.AFTER: Here it is turned into a double vanity and sitting on the wall that was once open to below. I had the wood back that’s shaped mimicked in quartz. We found a white quartz remnant for this piece. (Photo by Sara Yoder for Laura Medicus Interiors)

This photo is featured in April’s Bath Issue from Colorado Homes & Lifestyles! There are a lot of really gorgeous bathrooms in it – this one might be the most budget friendly though in terms of finishes.

If you have an old home – I urge you to love it and all of it’s imperfections. If you don’t, treat your home well in the hopes that it will be an old home too someday.

“Give me an old house full of memories and I will give you a hundred novels!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

Published by Laura Medicus Interiors

Laura is a Denver Interior Designer who runs an Interior Design Studio based in sunny Colorado with a strong commitment to livable and interesting interiors. She also runs The Colorado Nest, a Denver blog about Design, Art and Life in the Mountain West and co-hosts the book podcast "The Inside Flap" on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play.
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